`Ladder 49' Shows Life In The Line Of Fire

dvd & video - review

March 11, 2005|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

Ladder 49 is a solid, unsurprising, old-fashioned firefighting melodrama. It's a string of sentimental snapshots of a firefighter's life told in flashback as he and his crew fight for his life in a towering inferno where he has been trapped.

Every cliche in every movie or TV show about firefighters is recycled here but often to pleasant effect. A comfortable leading-man turn by Joaquin Phoenix, a professional supporting performance by John Travolta and a knowing way with the fires themselves don't make for cutting-edge drama.

Phoenix's character takes a tumble in a grain-elevator fire in Baltimore. And as firefighters led by his chief, Travolta, struggle to find him and cut him free, he and they recall his career as a fireman.

Director Jay Russell is the nephew of a firefighter and a specialist in sentiment (My Dog Skip and Tuck Everlasting were his). He has a reverence for the subject that pretty much precludes the film showing us anything new, from the corner hangout Irish bar to the growing, boisterous family. Brave men are hurt, brave men die, and then we go to their funerals.

As its Disney lineage suggests, Ladder 49 is a firefighting movie that's family-friendly. Treated as a movie you can take your kids to, its sense of routine heroism, the reassuring continuity of people who show up for work and save us when we need saving, is its greatest asset.